You’ve probably heard the jargon being thrown about and have heard Local SEO practitioners tell you that your business needs more citations. But, as a business owner, what is a local search citation and how does it affect your business?
Simply put, a local search citation is nothing but a citation of your business’ information (name, address and phone number) anywhere on the web. In plain English, any site that lists your business’ info is a citation for all practical purposes.
Though most local citations contain your business name, address and phone number, they may also sometimes have other information about your business including:
- Website
- Business logo and media
- Description
- Hours Of Operation
The Two Types Of Citations
There are two different categories of citations based on where your information is present. These include:
I. Structured Citations
This is any mention of your business information on a web directory, phone book or yellowpages sites. These are sites that are specifically created to house and publish business data.
An example of a popular directory and a source of structured citations is Yellowpages.com
II. Unstructured Citations
Unstructured citations are pretty much anything else. A mention on a press release, an article citing your business, a blog post with a mention of your business. This is a broad category and can sometimes get hard to track.
Why Are Citations Important?
Multiple local search surveys involving experts have concluded that the quantity and quality of your citations, both structured and unstructured impacts your rankings in Google’s local search index.
Talk to any practitioner and they will tell you that citations are probably one of the three most important things you should be chasing behind if you’re trying to improve your rankings in the local search pack.
But, Any Random Citation Isn’t Good Enough
While building local citations, you should be careful to include only sites that are non-spammy and will not be detrimental to your Local SEO efforts.
In general, it is a good practice to run all of your citation sources on a tool like Ahrefs or MajesticSEO to ensure that it’s coming from a good source. This post is also a good resource that can help identify if a citation source is good or bad.
Bear In Mind That Your Citations Should Be More Than Just Random Profiles
Though building citations can help your with your Google rankings, that shouldn’t be your only focus when it comes to building citations; especially on structured sources.
Other than Google, you should focus on getting complete, optimized and clean profiles on Bing, Yelp, Yellowpages or any other sites that may be popular in your industry. If you’re a restaurant for example, your #1 focus outside Google should be on Zomato and TripAdvisor which can both drive tons of traffic to your site if done properly.